Join us for an evening with Henry and Priscilla Ireys, who will speak about their new book, The Keep: Living with the Tame and the Wild on a Mountain Farm. A conversation with Paula Whyman will follow. This in-person event will be free and open to the public. We recommend arriving early for the best seating.
About the Book: The Keep: Living with the Tame and the Wild on a Mountainside Farm portrays a marriage through the lens of a livestock farm in Appalachia. When a couple finds a worn-out homestead promising refuge from hectic lives and encroaching illness, their world opens to unexpected adventures: breeding heritage livestock, managing guardian dogs, dealing with the death of treasured animals. The book captures the grittiness of farm life and the healing power of place.
Written separately by wife and husband with distinctly separate voices, the stories in The Keep—a word referring to a castle’s most secure sanctuary—reflect the couple’s differing perspectives. Priscilla embraces the intensity of loving animals; Henry grapples with the mysteries of nature. In telling their tales, the authors illuminate their own marriage—as complicated, improbable, and enduring as the land itself.
About the Authors: Henry Ireys had a forty-year career as a health policy researcher working at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, and Mathematica Policy Research and published numerous papers in health policy journals. Since his retirement, he has been writing for The Hampshire Review about farming and the natural world and has published stories in several anthologies of Appalachian writers.
Priscilla Ireys attended the Art Institute of Pittsburgh and FIT in New York. She designed and made stage clothes for country music stars including Loretta Lynn. Under her own label, she sold hand-painted scarves and jackets to Nordstrom, Henri Bendel, and many high-end boutiques. She left the fashion industry after thirty years to focus on farming and the conservation of heritage breeds. She has written numerous stories for Small Farmer’s Journal.
Since 2001, Henry and Priscilla have lived on a farm in Hampshire County, West Virginia.
About the Moderator: Bad Naturalist is Paula Whyman’s first book of nonfiction. Her earlier book, You May See a Stranger, is an award-winning linked short story collection. Her writing has appeared in The Washington Post and The American Scholar, and in journals including McSweeney’s Quarterly, VQR, Ploughshares, and The Hudson Review. She was awarded residencies by MacDowell, Yaddo, VCCA, The Studios of Key West, and Oak Spring Garden Foundation. Her work on this book was supported in part by the Maryland State Arts Council. She spends her time on a mountain in Virginia with her husband and a mercurial standard poodle. Visit her at paulawhyman.com, and keep up with news from the mountain via her Bad Naturalist newsletter.
The Keep will be released on October 1. To order the book, please see below for the New Dominion Bookshop book order form or call the shop at 434-295-2552.
"A delightful chronicle of a moment in time on a parcel in Appalachia."
—Gretchen Legler
New Dominion Bookshop Book Order Form
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